Hillary Clinton has the advantage, currently, in delegate votes for the Democratic nomination, and the odds are definitely in her favor as they have been from the beginning of this race. It has become clear she never expected a serious challenge from the left, but her recent adoption of Bernie’s positions on trade, climate change, labor, and a host of other issues demonstrates how important it is for Bernie to be in this race and stay in this race. Without him, Hillary would continue to take for granted the support of progressives in the party while completely ignoring the actual concerns and desires of progressives in the party. I’m not saying that Hillary is a bad choice for POTUS as some Berners would argue. On the contrary, she may be the best BIG Ball insider politician since LBJ. But after reading Ninox’s very good post this morning about reasons to be excited for Hillary, I wanted to provide a fuller picture of the candidate and express the reasons to be depressed about her too. My goal is to do so within the bounds of Kos’ edict, and the truth should not be censored. The truth is there are also five good reasons to be depressed about Hillary:
1. Hillary Clinton is very, very bad for American workers
She wants to take credit for the economic success of the late 90s that was due primarily to the Internet bubble and a reckless scheme by Wall Street banks to drive up consumer debt across the country. But she refuses to take responsibility for the devastation wrought by so-called “free trade” deals like NAFTA that led to the closing of thousands of American manufacturing plants and the loss of middle class jobs for millions of Americans. She was for the TPP before she was against it. She bragged about NAFTA “proving its worth.” Then she changed her rhetoric to try and attract votes in 2008, but her behavior still shows a strong support for international corporations while ignoring the plight of American families suffering in poverty as a result of trade policies she supported. You can read more about her constantly shifting stance on trade here, but even under the best case scenario, we can’t expect any movement under her administration to support the American working class. Her call for a $12 minimum wage to be implemented over four years would still leave tens of millions of hard-working Americans in poverty. When it comes to supporting Wall Street and big corporations, she’ll shoot for the moon. But for American workers, she only offers crumbs and platitudes.
2. Hillary Clinton has been consistently Neo-liberal
There are many excellent blogs already on Daily Kos that point out HRC’s neo-liberal way, and I could not do as good a job on that as Le Gauchiste did last summer in his post “Anti-Capitalist Meetup: How Neo-Liberal is Hillary Clinton?” But for the sake of brevity and clarity, let’s just say that Hillary represents more of today’s status quo political adherence to the "five main points" of Neo-liberalism: the rule of the market, cutting social spending, deregulation, privatization, and eliminating the concepts of the public good or community. What will we get with a Clinton presidency? Foot dragging on raising the minimum wage; further deregulation of wall street and international corporate behavior; farming out public services to for-profit corporations so they can take their investors’ share of our tax dollars first before helping any working American; and more of the same old drumbeat that the problem with America’s economy is that we just aren’t working hard enough as individuals to cut each others’ throats. Great. REALLY looking forward to that.
3. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for Wall Street
There’s no sense beating a dead horse on this one and there are plenty of good sources like this one that highlight HRC’s commitment to big banks. Make no mistake, the greed and recklessness of Wall Street will not just continue unabashed for the next four years if HRC wins in November, it will accelerate and expand exponentially. Like Obama has done the past eight years, Hillary will fill both the Federal Reserve and the SEC with insider Wall Street bankers whose only interests lie in helping other insider Wall Street bankers continue to commit fraud and get away with it. A Hillary Clinton presidency virtually guarantees that the same individuals and corporations who nearly destroyed our economy through recklessness and fraud get to keep gambling with our economic security. But don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll have a taxpayer funded bail-out ready to go in case anything goes wrong. Right?
4. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more war
In every instance of international conflict over the past two decades where American “interests” were at stake, HRC has supported armed conflict by American troops. I could write at length about this, but I’ll leave it to Nick Gillespie at the Daily Beast who says it much better than I can:
It’s not just that Hillary Clinton gets “high-profile foreign policy guidance” from the same firm that advises hawkish Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who last year supported increasing the Pentagon budgetwithout cutting other government outlays. Nor is it that as first lady, Clinton “urged” her husband to bomb Serbia in 1999 and, as a senator from New York, she supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq without reservation and said during herfailed 2008 presidential bid, “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”
As secretary of state, she rarely missed an opportunity to back more and bigger interventions. “Clinton backed a bold escalation of the Afghanistan war,” wrote Michael Crowley in Time in 2014. “She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed air strikes against the Assad regime. She backed intervention in Libya, and her State Department helped enable Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. In fact, Clinton may have been the administration’s most reliable advocate for military action.” That’s exactly the reason why Republican John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain joked to The New Republic that it would be a “tough choice” for him if the presidency came down to Clinton or the libertarian-leaning dove Rand Paul. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton herself joked to CBS News after the death of Muammar Gaddafi in the wake of bombing runs joined by the United States. Even after Libya was plunged into utter chaos and has become a “safe haven” for ISIS, Clinton still calls our intervention there “smart power at its best.” Which raises the question: What could dumbpower possibly look like?
5. Civil liberties? What civil liberties?
If you have been appalled at the stances the Obama Administration has taken on NSA eavesdropping, overzealous prosecution of whistleblowers, rampant secrecy, and the continuation of the abysmal “war on drugs,” then you will be really disappointed with Hillary in the white house. You can count out any changes to the Fed’s policy of prosecuting and criminalizing marijuana use, and will likely see an increased attack on states that have decriminalized or legalized it. HRC also voted for the Patriot Act and its subsequent re-authorization, defended NSA surveillance of American citizens, and accused Edward Snowden of supporting terrorists. In 2005, She joined a bi-partisan group of senators in pushing the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, that the ACLU says would have effectively legalized discrimination, and then she introduced a bill making flag burning a felony. HRC is certainly light years ahead of most Republican politicians on civil liberty issues, but that’s not saying much considering the rhetoric of their party’s likely nominee. To argue that Hillary “is not as bad as them,” is really not an argument FOR civil liberties at all.
I know HRC has many positive qualities as well, and I’m happy Ninox pointed them out this morning. We should have as many points on the table as possible for voters to consider as we move to the second half of our nominating process. But let’s not start sugar-coating the truth when it comes to Hillary Clinton as our assumptive nominee. She may be the most qualified candidate for the position in many ways, but that’s only saying that she’s great at playing a broken game. You want integrity? Vote Bernie. You want the best manipulator of a corrupted system? Vote Hillary. Come November, I may very well do so myself. But it will be depressing when I do.
EDITED to revise the opening paragraph to get this more in line with Kos’ rules for posting. Thanks all for the recs and discussion.